My school redux: re-storying schooling with the My School website

Abstract

This paper explores the effects of audit cultures on school education through a highly personal reading of the My School website, launched in Australia in 2010. It situates two personal narratives, from the points of view of student and teacher, alongside the other stories available about two of the secondary schools listed on the website. Although statistics such as those generated through the National Assessment Program – Literacy and Numeracy tests, school comparisons and post-school destinations present certain kinds of stories about these schools, I argue that these are reductionist and insufficient for understanding the complexities of pedagogical spaces and the teachers and learners within them. Whilst arguments for hard data to address educational inequity can be marshalled to support My School, I suggest that it also inadvertently disguises other elements of schooling and risks increasing inequity. Rather, the statistical stories might be recognised as partial and supplemented and disrupted by richer accounts, including narrative accounts, about schooling.

Keywords:

• narrative
• audit culture
• My School
• NAPLAN
• Australia
• equity

Acknowledgements

Thanks to my UWS colleagues Robyn Gregson, Loshini Naidoo, Wayne Sawyer and Carolyn Williams who provided feedback on early drafts of this paper, and to the anonymous reviewers who assisted me enormously to find and to refine my argument.

Notes

1. See Definition of ‘apparatus’ in Concise Oxford English Dictionary.

2. Lingard (2010) suggests that there were 4.5 million hits on the first day.

3. The NAPLAN literacy component entails separate multiple choice/ closed answer ‘Reading’ and ‘Language Conventions’ tests, and an open ended ‘Writing’ task. Results are reported separately in the domains of ‘Reading’, ‘Writing’, ‘Spelling’ and ‘Punctuation’.

4. As yet, it is unclear whether there will be any attempt at articulation between the new national Australian Curriculum and NAPLAN tests.

5. See for example, www.acara.edu.au/verve/_resources/Guide_to_understanding_ICSEA.pdf

6. For Flatland High, the downward trends continue in My School version 3 (published in 2012 and reporting on 2010 outcomes): students completing Year 12 had dropped to just 57, students continuing on to university had dropped to 35, student enrolments had dropped further from 444 to 405, four fewer teachers were working at the school, the school ICSEA value had dropped several points and slightly over three quarters of students were located in the bottom half of the Student Background table.

7. Results in all literacy bands in version 3 also parallel the patterns in version 2, suggesting some value-adding between Years 7 and 9 at the school.

8. Flatland High had 60 SIM schools listed in version 1; and 48 SIM schools in version 2.

9. For Pindan Catholic College, trends also continue into My School version 3: enrolments have continued a slight but steady increase as have teacher numbers, higher numbers of students appear in the top half of the Student Background table with the balance shifting above the mean in 2010, and Indigenous enrolments have slowly declined (reported as 52% in 2008, 48% in 2009, 47% in 2010, 44% in 2011).

10. Year 7 is not in secondary schools in this state.

11. Thanks to my anonymous reviewer for drawing my attention to this point.

12. See in particular papers presented at forums organised in 2010 at the University of Sydney (‘The Blind Assessor’) and at the University of Technology Sydney (published in Professional Voice, the journal of the Public Education Union) including Adams (2010), Berliner (2010), Caldwell (2010), Comber (2010), Hargreaves (2010), Ladwig (2010), Luke (2010), Preston (2010), Wu (2010).